Imagine you went to a tyre company and purchased 600 tyres for your car plant for next Tuesday. When you go to collect next Tuesday you’re told that the company cannot deliver. And the reason for that is because they had to give your 600 tyres to another buyer (either because they were a more important customer or the company had promised to deliver, and knew that delivery charges were going to up on Wednesday).

That’s exactly what happens when you get bumped off a flight. You paid for something to be delivered at a certain time, and the company failed to do it.

So what can you expect in return? For the example involving the tyre purchases, one would expect the company to at least pay you back all your money and on top that compensate you for the late production of your cars.

So why don’t passengers expect the same thing? In the US, it is common for passengers to be offered a free return ticket or cash as compensation (see link here.) but in Asia, I have found that most passengers simply accept it as a consequence of flying.

Yesterday while I was flying back to Hong Kong from Singapore on SIA exactly the same thing happened and the SIA reps explained to us that they needed our plane for another flight as the plane for that other flight had technical problems - as though that were a perfectly acceptable reason for being able to bump us off the flight. Only 12 passengers (including myself) thought this was not on and decided to raise hell at the airport. It’s one thing to face a delay due to weather conditions or technical problems on your plane, but not for anything else. Least of all technical problems experienced by other planes!

SIA customer service has promised to contact us over compensation and I’m still waiting for that to happen. If I don’t hear from them within a week I will speak to the Consumers Association of Singapore and my lawyer because I don’t intend to let them get away with it because I don’t tolerate poor value.

And neither should you!